WOMEN ON U.S. PAPER MONEY: LUCY PICKENS

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V18 2015 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 18, Number 34, August 23, 2015, Article 36

Don't forget Lucy Pickens! Overlooked by most columnists discussing the question of women on U.S. paper money is Lucy Pickens, who appeared on Confederate notes. History is history regardless of politics or who ends up winning a war. Numismatics helps keep alive the memory of all participants, no matter whose side they were on. Here's an excerpt from a nice article by Michael Bugeja published in Coin World August 14, 2015. -Editor

Current news events I mention here likely will have played out by the time you read this. But one seldom mentioned bit of historical news will remain: the appearance of a woman on the Confederate $1 and $100 notes, Lucy Petway Holcombe Pickens, also known as the “Queen of the Confederacy.”

This summer, Jack Lew, secretary of the Treasury, decided it was time for a woman to appear on the $10 bill. So many American women qualified for that honor, including human rights advocate and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, civil rights hero Rosa Parks, and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Nonhobbyists may believe the woman to appear on our $10 bill will be the first in U.S. paper currency history. However, with their love of history, many hobbyists know that Pocahontas appeared on the back of an 1875 $20 national bank note and Martha Washington on the Series 1886 $1 silver certificate.

Lucy Pickens appeared on the Confederate $1 and $100 note in 1862. Pickens was the wife of South Carolina Gov. Francis Wilkinson Pickens, who took office shortly before that state was the first to secede from the Union. He also sanctioned the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in 1861.

Lucy Pickens was said to have watched the bombardment from a rooftop with others.

Before the outbreak of war, she reportedly agreed to marry Francis Pickens only if he became an ambassador. Smitten with her, he lobbied to become U.S. minister to Russia in 1858. There the couple befriended Czar Alexander II and spouse Maria Alexandrovna.

While she became the CSA icon during the war, she rapidly was forgotten in the decades that followed, surpassed by other women who held different beliefs, including the aforementioned Tubman, abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and nurse Clara Barton, one of the founders of the American Red Cross.

This column is not really about Lucy Pickens. Nor is it about the woman on the U.S. $10 note, nor the Confederate flag at the South Carolina Capitol. It is about how our hobby educates us about history, prompting us to research the past by the coins and paper currency that represent it.

Here's a link to a recent USA Today article on the topic of a Woman on $10. National Numismatic Collection head Ellen Feingold and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin are among those quoted. -Editor

To read the complete article, see:
Woman on $10 will launch currency overhaul (www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/08/20/woman-10-launch-currency-overhaul/31917533/)